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114 Articles

MIT Mobile Cloud

June 22, 2008 by 15 Comments


The MIT Mobile Experience lab has just developed this ambitious interactive installation called The Cloud. Located in Firenze, Italy, The Cloud is a sort of sculpture with over 15,000 LEDs and several miles of fiber optics. The tips of the fibers glow, but they also change colors in response to human interaction, including touching it or standing near it. The Cloud uses a combination of proximity and touch sensors to achieve this. It also has two cameras and a microphone, which allows it draw input from various sources and output a much richer, more organic response.

[via Cool Hunting]

Swarm Robotics

May 13, 2008 by 4 Comments


Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He’s on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.

[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.

Some quotes:

  • “There’s more sensors in a cockroach’s butt than any robot”
  • “12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build”
  • “If it can break your ankle, it’s a real [rc] car.”

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